Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Sloppy Arithmetic Chips

Recent research from MIT has come up with imprecise CPU chips. These chips can perform some calculations much faster, but at the cost of accuracy. The results it would generate can be +- 1% of the correct value. Of course, the uses for such a device are somewhat specific. Obviously they won't be used to calculate how much radiation to deliver to cancer patients, but they can be used for things like video and audio processing. Pretty cool. It would be nice to see these sorts of chips integrated with more traditional ones. Apparently there are a lot of difficulties with that. I can imagine.

In other news, I realized that I use the three most popular operation systems on a day-to-day basis now. I have my Windows-Ubuntu dualboot at home, and Macs at work. Neat. Hopefully, I can get Ubuntu to not hate me though.

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